In this morning’s hearings before the House Armed Services Committee, Chairman Ike Skelton asked Petraeus to give him some sort of sign that the nascent Iraqi government was within sight of being some sort of functioning body. Petraeus made an effort to assure Skelton that this was the case, and cited Prime Minister Maliki’s actions in Basra as a clear sign:

PETRAEUS: First of all, Mr. Chairman I would point out that they want to do that as much as we do. Indeed, they are under — they put themselves under enormous personal pressure, and collective pressure, from various political elements in Iraq, to increasingly exercise their sovereignty. In fact that’s exactly what Prime Minister Maliki did, of course, when he decided that as the Constitutional Commander in Chief of the armed forces of Iraq to deploy forces on short notice to Basra…

Maliki launched a badly planned, disastrous attack that made Iraq even less stable – Iraq has achieved American-style government already! Or Republican-style government, anyway.

Now they just have to start torturing people and set up some warrantless wiretaps (assuming they haven’t already), and pretty soon they won’t need our guidance at all.